I still see today a lot of people saying, talking about removal of a infected computer. Programs like Malewarebytes, etc. do not 100% remove or fix the damage that the virus or malware did to the OS itself or 100% clean the system. Microsoft themselves have a program called "The Malacious Software Removal Tool" for removing bad programs, Microsoft says in the program that not all known virus/malware they detect can not be 100% removed.
That was possible many years ago when viruses/malware were just personal jokes or annoyances, when all they did stuff like open and close your CD drive tray randomly.
Today they are digging deep, intergrated or even hijacking the system with the intent of staying in your system or for money. They literally rewrite or replace system files in the OS to make the OS work in the virus/malware favor to block the these to prevent infection to begin with or to invite others bad installs in to the system without detection you system will actually get worse. I've seen many infected systems like this in my experience in most cases today. The OS is working strange or something is not working. How are you going to know which systems file were damaged or need to fix or what was changed to begin with how are you going to find out, you don't period?
The only way to guaratee and the easiest, fast way that the system is restored and free from infection is to backup, reformat/wipe clean the hard drive and re-install from scratch or from a safe system image. This assures that the OS is restored back to its original functioning state in which Microsoft or Apple intended and everything works.
We here at Berntech practice this with all our systems, all our PC's are backed-up regularly. We create a original image of each hard drive to a DVD or external hard drive for backup that we can use to restore the system if indeed a infection occurs, I also do this will all my personal computers. Pay attention to your behavior on the net because that is how most infections occur today, your chance of infection will be close to nill, just look at our Securing Your PC... article to learn how.
